27 August, 2008

During the April 16 debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, moderator George Stephanopoulos brought up “a gentleman named William Ayers,” who “was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol, and other buildings. He’s never apologized for that.” Stephanopoulos then asked Obama to explain his relationship with Ayers. Obama’s answer: “The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense, George.” Obama was indeed only eight in early 1970. I was only nine then, the year Ayers’s Weathermen tried to murder me.

As for the “I was only eight” line, how preposterous. Obama was an adult when he made friends with and had his political career launched in the home of an unrepentant terrorist.

Through a series of painstaking experiments involving mice, the Harvard biologists pinpointed three crucial molecular switches that, when flipped, completely convert a common cell in the pancreas into the more precious insulin-producing ones that diabetics need to survive.

…

“One day, this may allow the doctor to replace the scalpel with a sort of genetic surgery,” Lanza said. “If this can be perfected, it would represent one of the Holy Grails of medicine.”

Now mice aren’t men, and the application of this method to human diabetics and patients with other diseases is by no means on the immediate horizon; it may of course never materialize, as diabetic mice have been cured before. You can never be sure, and especially not after just one experiment. But whatever the eventual clinical applications, the implications of the work for cell biology are extraordinary—that sound you hear is PhD-level textbooks being thrown in the garbage all over the world.

What an age we live in. Look at some other (speculative, breezily-presented) things that just might be coming along.